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Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Toronto’s Globe and Mail reported in May that the Chinese government is having trouble controlling the spending and leisure habits of the nation’s youth and young adults. Party leaders still appear on “most admired” lists, but so do Bill Gates and the Taiwanese boy band F4. The government recently banned a TV show starring the band but backed down after state-owned TV stations said they needed the advertising revenue....

Lead Stories In March a widower filed suit against Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida, alleging that its mortuary science program used bodies from a local funeral home for embalming practice without permission of the deceased persons’ families….And in February an internal audit revealed that since 1950 Greenlane Hospital, the premier heart-research facility in New Zealand, had taken the hearts from at least 1,350 dead fetuses and infants without consulting the families....

As one of the first British DJs to grasp the possibilities of house and techno in the late 80s, Paul Oakenfold became a crucial figure in rave culture. His production work on Happy Mondays’ 1990 Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches helped create a dialogue between rave and rock; his mid-90s stint opening for U2 introduced trad-rock audiences worldwide to uncut dance music; and his 1998 mix CD, Tranceport, helped usher in arena trance as the biggest club music of the past half decade....

“I have a compass which keeps spinning me into zones of conflict,” declares New Delhi documentarian Amar Kanwar in his masterly video essay A Season Outside (1998), and in a country like India he never has far to travel. V.S. Naipaul once called the partitioning of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India “as great a holocaust as that caused by Nazi Germany,” and tremors of ultranationalism, ethnic cleansing, and religious hysteria still radiate from that geopolitical fault line....

Praised With Faint Damnation Pressure? Urgency? A few sentences later the same editorial admitted that a do-nothing legislature had responded to neither: it had “cynically ignored the imperative of capital punishment reform.” In a Sunday editorial, after the governor had commuted 167 death sentences, the Tribune noticed that the moratorium wasn’t moot after all. Death row “will fill up again soon enough,” it predicted, mentioning that incoming governor Blagojevich “has promised to retain the moratorium....

Richard Buckner seems unable to write songs unless his heart is broken, and on records he can come across as a self-loathing sad sack–tres romantique, eh? His new album, Impasse (Overcoat), chronicles the dissolution of his marriage to Penny Jo Buckner, a breakup rendered all the more poignant by the fact that she stuck around long enough to play drums on the songs. Buckner increasingly places more stock in how his words sound than in what they mean....

There was a painful moment for Chicago Dance and Music Alliance head Matthew Brockmeier at last week’s unveiling of a year’s worth of dance-audience research. Results from the $100,000 study, funded by the Chicago Community Trust as part of its multiyear Excellence in Dance Initiative, were used in developing a plan to boost visibility and ticket sales for local dance companies. Now came word that the trust will also fund part of that $360,000 marketing effort....

SHIVKUMAR SHARMA & ZAKIR HUSSAIN Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Shivkumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain have both stretched the boundaries of northern India’s Hindustani classical music: Sharma almost single-handedly introduced a new instrument, a trapezoidal hammered dulcimer called the santoor, and Hussain continues to explore fusions with music from the West, as well as from elsewhere in his own country. In 1950, when Sharma first adopted the santoor–at the behest of his father, vocalist and tabla player Uma Dutt Sharma–it was unknown outside Kashmiri folk music....

This two-month showcase of Chicago sketch comedy features more than 30 local ensembles–some well established, some new to the scene–representing a remarkable range of styles and viewpoints, with two to four groups sharing the bill at each performance. Participating troupes include Annoyance Productions, Weaselicious, Brick, ÁSalsation!, GayCo Productions, the WNEP Theater, and many others; the festival is presented by Posin’ at the Bar. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sketch Fest runs through March 2 at the Theatre Building, 1225 W....

MARY TIMONY 6/14, EMPTY BOTTLE Indie-rock It Girl Mary Timony doesn’t break any new ground on The Golden Dove (Matador), her second solo album since Helium went on “hiatus.” But her fans wouldn’t have it any other way: her distinctive style, which draws on folk, psych, and even church music, provides a grounded sort of mystical prettiness for those who like real toads in their fantasy gardens. Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous helped produce and played on the album; here cellist Amy Domingues, bassist Jeff Goddard, drummer Christina Files, and pedal-steel guitarist Al Weatherhead will help Timony cast her spell....

A stocky middle-aged man in a polyester shirt with a phone attached to his belt faced a group of casually stylish, immaculately groomed women seated behind a table. He held out a choker made of chunky, dull-colored metal. “When you see my jewelry, I want you to be overwhelmed by it,” he said to the women, who looked decidedly underwhelmed. Undeterred, he held up a pair of clasp earrings. “You can wear them all day, they don’t pinch,” he said proudly....

For the last 30 years or so development has steadily inched west along Irving Park Road toward the city’s boundaries. Only one parcel remains undeveloped, the land just east of Harlem, which is still a marshy forest, home to migratory birds, deer, and even coyotes. The institution was surrounded by acres of vacant land. “It was like having a forest right in the neighborhood,” says Swider, who grew up in the area in the 1950s....

Jim Bracey and Vernon Doyle have learned to count on each other in times of crisis. When a tornado touched down in Mokena in 1996, Bracey, a Salvation Army chaplain, brought Doyle along to help hand out food and water. He did the same thing a year later, following an explosion at a Joliet power plant. Three weeks ago, as fire tore through a chemical factory at 87th and Cottage Grove, Bracey sent Doyle to find ice....

Six videos showing in conjunction with “The Color of Violence,” a March 2002 conference on ending “both sexual/domestic violence and state-sponsored violence” against women of color. In History and Memory (1991), Rea Tajiri considers the internment of her mother’s Japanese-American family during World War II, but instead of resorting to the trite language of victimhood, Tajiri presents a flood of images, printed text, and voice-over, evoking the ambiguity of lived experience and the fluidity of meaning amid shifting social conditions....

Friday 4/6 – Thursday 4/12 7 SATURDAY “The Chicago region is one of a handful of metropolitan areas in the world that has a high concentration of globally significant natural communities,” say the folks at Chicago Wilderness. The group is a partnership of 124 public and private organizations devoted to restoring and managing 200,000 acres of protected natural land from northwestern Indiana to southeastern Wisconsin. Today CW chair John Rogner, World Resources Institute head Jonathan Lash, and former EPA administrator Carol Browner will examine how CW has become a model for environmental activism at a lecture called “Earth on Edge: Reclaiming Urban Ecosystems....

At Frankie J’s on Broadway, dinner-theater audiences will find neither buffet lines nor aging icons singing “Some Enchanted Evening.” In chef and comedian Frank Janisch’s newest production, Frankie J Supperstar, the dinner is the theater: restaurant patrons get an up close look at the preparation of the meal they’re eating while Janisch delivers jokes and cooking tips and waitstaff in white robes twirl between the tables in a lighthearted parody of Jesus Christ Superstar....

The Chicago premiere of Stephen Schwartz’s newest musical features an enthusiastic, talented student cast in a visually striking production. Schwartz is no stranger to telling biblical stories in song and dance–he’s perhaps best known for Godspell–so it’s no surprise this musical is based on Genesis. It opens with Adam and Eve’s creation, then Eve is tempted to sin by a five-person snake dancing vaudeville-style, and by intermission Cain and his offspring have been cursed by a vengeful grandfather....

Progressive Rock Reconsidered With the revolution of ’77, you’d think prog rockers would’ve been the first lined up against the wall, but megastars like Led Zeppelin made a fatter target. In fact, prog was as hated by reigning rock royalty like Zeppelin as by rock’s new proletariat, and by the time of “Anarchy in the U.K.” it was already widely considered too pathetic to waste spit on. By the dawn of the 80s, people who would still cautiously defend “Stairway to Heaven” would deny ever having owned a million-seller like Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans....

If you want a lemur from Madagascar for a helper monkey, forget it: poachers don’t work for peanuts these days. If you’re a researcher for an institution like the Field Museum, though, and you can convince the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department that you need specimens of rare creatures, then you’re in like Flynn, says Peter Wood, a research associate from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Well, usually....

It’s an Earthquake in My Heart, Goat Island Performance Group, at the Athenaeum Theatre, through June 8. Goat Island has always struggled to give its spoken texts as much impact as its nonverbal imagery given the power of its harrowing but lyrical physicality, especially in enigmatic quotidian routines repeated to the point of near collapse. In their newest piece, which marks their debut as Performing Arts Chicago’s resident ensemble, they make a radical departure and give the spoken word nearly complete dominion over the first 50 minutes of a 95-minute piece....